Your coffee will cost 10% more if you have a penis.

So you’re standing in line for your morning coffee. Latte? That will be $3.50. Unless you have a penis in which case your latte will cost you $3.80.

That’s what happened when the YWCA in New Zealand came up with an innovative way to highlight the pay gap between men and women: if a guy earns more for doing the same job as a woman, why shouldn’t he pay more for drinking the same coffee?

According to news reports from NZ:

Men were charged 10% more for coffees at a cart parked on Victoria University’s law campus in Wellington yesterday morning. While a long black or a flat white cost women $3.50 and $4 respectively, men had to fork out $3.80 and $4.40.

The 10% price difference is based on this: women in New Zealand get paid on average 10% less than men do. Meaning the price of the coffee was designed to highlight the gender pay gape.

In Australia, women earn 80c for every dollar a man earns over a lifetime. Fair? Not so much. And it can be a difficult issue to get men interested in, which is why the idea of a coffee-gender index is such an intriguing one.

From Stuff.co.nz:

Organiser Lisa Fedyszyn said she wanted men to understand the issue and be just as outraged as women were, ”if the percentage isn’t zero then it’s not fair.”

Ms Fedyszyn said the coffee cart had also featured in Auckland, where many men had resorted to getting their wives or girlfriends to buy their coffees for them.

Pay Equity Challenge Coalition spokesperson Angela McLean said the campaign was timely, because there were new figures showing the gender gap had widened from 12.85 per cent in September last year to 14.18 per cent at the same time this year.

Interesting idea – imagine if everything we bought had a different price tag depending on what you had in your pants.

What do you think of this idea? Do you believe it would rectify the pay gap?